Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Also By
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Text and cover design
Copyright © 2021 Becky Moynihan
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. And resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Published by Broken Books
www.beckymoynihan.com
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express permission of the publisher.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7327330-7-7
Cover design by Becky Moynihan
Cover model by Ravven
www.depositphotos.com
In loving memory of Rosie,
who reminds me that family goes beyond blood and love can beat the odds.
PROLOGUE
LOCHLAN
With every shallow inhale, the bullet burrowed deeper into my heart.
Agonizingly slow. Burning. Charring. Melting.
Troy reached for my chest and I batted his hand away.
“Touch me and I’ll break your fingers,” I grunted, the words like sandpaper against my throat. My younger brother rolled his eyes at my stubbornness but acquiesced all the same.
For the last several hours, pain had been my constant companion.
White hot. Razor sharp. Splintering my vision.
The tiny piece of silver blazed and blazed, scorching the one vulnerable organ in my body faster than it could heal. The other bullets had been dug out shortly after I’d regained consciousness, but this last one required a little more finesse than jabbing a finger into my flesh.
If I were a Feltore, the bullet would have killed me by now. Silver was a vampire’s kryptonite. Even the most powerful Venturi were susceptible to it. Not as quickly, but silver left in the heart for too long was always fatal.
“At least dull the pain,” Troy said, returning to my bedside with a tumbler of amber liquor in hand. “You look like death.”
I accepted the alcohol without comment, still too furious with him and my older brother for niceties. Troy may have pulled us to safety while Kade distracted the sheriff and his deputy. He’d even pried the bullets from my back. But I didn’t trust him. Not with this. Not after the crap he’d pulled earlier today.
And I still had time. Not much, but I’d been in this situation before. I could hold out a little while longer.
With the sun’s departure had come the forced transition into our true forms. I didn’t bother cloaking myself in shadow, and neither did my brothers. We never hid our vampire nature from each other, and I was in too much pain to show them just how angry I was.
In this state, it was hard to tell my brothers and I apart. Our eyes were equally red, our skin the same shade as our pitch black hair. Only our hair’s length differentiated us, with Everett’s being the shortest and Troy’s the longest. Mine was currently plastered to my forehead, soaked through with sweat.
Everett watched me from his spot by my bedroom door—more like his post, since he refused to let me leave. He fiddled with the gold-banded ruby ring on his pinky finger, shrewdly studying me.
“Loch, speak to us. Why the unnecessary pain? You know Troy and I have your back. We won’t let the bullet kill you,” he tried to reason, his earlier beef with me all but forgotten. If only I could forget so easily. If only I could make everything go back to how it used to be.
But that was the problem.
Everything had irrevocably changed, and I didn’t believe they had my back anymore. Not with this.
Our impenetrable brotherly bond was crumbling to ash, and I knew why.
Ignoring his question, I set the glass on my bedside table and picked up my phone. My hands shook as I called Kade again, further slowing my breathing to buy me more time. When he picked up, I spoke first, voicing the same question I’d asked him over and over for the past several hours. “Did you find her?”
The sound of my drothen’s sigh caused my heart to thud in trepidation. Darkness threatened to drag me under as the bullet shifted again, scorching a deadly path. I rode the pain, focusing on the only thing that truly mattered.
On finding McKenna Belmont.
On making certain she was alive, safe, and well.
My heart could very well stop beating for all I cared if she was lost to me. I had promised to protect her and failed miserably. The least I could do was make sure she was okay before I let someone pry a bullet from my heart. If the extraction wasn’t successful—if even the tiniest sliver of bullet was left behind—at least I’d know she was safe before the silver slowly killed me.
Everett was right to question me though. I hadn’t acted this unhinged in over a century. His suspicion was valid. But in the one hundred and forty-nine years of my existence, I’d never felt like this. The helpless pull to be near McKenna—the desire to protect, to bond, to claim—was real. Her blood sang to mine, a luring call stronger than any rhyme or spell. And I needed it. I needed every last inch of her to forge a connection with me.
It drove me insane, these wants and feelings I was powerless to resist. I shouldn’t want her. I should hate that I felt anything at all. That, after a century of trying to forget, she was unearthing emotions long since buried.
My entire being raged at the twisted irony of this bond we shared. But I knew, no matter how hard I fought against it, I would keep going back to her. I would torture myself, break every last vow, and endure any level of pain just to be near her again. No matter how badly I didn’t want our bond to exist, I couldn’t reject her.
She was silver to me, potent and lethal. A weakness I couldn’t afford. Yet, I craved to consume her.
I’d been honest with her last night. Curse or no curse, she wasn’t just a job to me. We had a connection. It took me a month to realize how deep, but I hadn’t shared the details with her. I almost had though. My traitorous instincts had blurted aloud a single word.
Solemae.
She hadn’t commented though. Hadn’t questioned me when my composure slipped. She had no idea what she was to me, and it needed to stay that way. If she knew, everything would fall apart. If she knew, I didn’t think either of us would have the power to reject our bond.
And I needed her to. I needed her to reject it before I begged her no
t to. Before I convinced myself that the pleasure of it far outweighed the suffering. Before I lost my tenuous hold on control and allowed my body to seal our fate.
And if I were to die while trying to complete the bond, she would be left exposed and unprotected. And if Everett or Troy were to find out the reason behind my death, they’d kill her in a heartbeat, dooming the entire vampire race. No amount of desire, of soul-sucking want and need, was worth that outcome.
I had made a solemn vow for a reason, publicly swearing never to break it under pain of death. No matter how conflicted I currently felt, I knew that a relationship with McKenna Belmont was out of the question. Convincing her to reject our bond was the only foreseeable option. Its very existence spelled disaster for us all, maybe even more so than the curse itself.
But first, I had to know that she was safe. Safe and alive. Or none of this would even matter—including removing the silver from my heart.
And so I waited with bated breath for Kade to speak, his prolonged silence more painful than the bullet slowly eating away at my life force. Finally, he said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?”
“Everything,” I rasped, struggling to sit up so I wouldn’t miss a word. “Tell me everything.”
1
KENNA
Bang, bang, bang.
“Hello?”
As always, silence answered my knocking and shouts. The heavy, deadbolted metal door was probably too thick to hear through anyway. I turned, squinting at the nearly undetectable red light tucked in the room’s upper left corner.
“Anyone there? I have the right to make a phone call!”
At least, I was pretty sure you were allowed to contact the outside world while inside a mental institution.
“How about a sketchpad? Books? An encyclopedia? I’m not picky!”
I waited—a minute, five minutes, ten. No one came.
Anger, fueled by helplessness, raged through me. Aunt Tess couldn’t do this. I was four days away from becoming a legal adult, for fate’s sake!
As far as I could tell, nearly a day had passed since the big blowup with my aunt. We’d finally been honest with each other, and I was still coming to terms with the awful truths she’d hurled at me. She hadn’t returned though, leaving me shaken to the core by her parting words.
He only wants to kill you. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can put this obsession behind you and do what you were created to do. Destroy them all.
Not only that, she thought I was under Lochlan’s thrall. I would have dismissed her words as paranoia—if she hadn’t also told me that he was one of the three dark princes.
A fact that changed everything.
I should have known. I should have seen it. The way he commanded a room simply by stepping into it. The natural way he ordered others around. Leadership oozed from his pores, along with a learned arrogance I assumed all royals bore, human and supernatural alike.
And he was a Venturi, a born vampire, an elite of his race. Of course he was a prince. It made perfect sense.
What didn’t make sense was the way he’d pursued me. Yes, he had hunted me down because of the century-long curse placed upon his kind and the supposed part I played in breaking it. I was the elusive maiden with a touch that slays, after all. But his intentions toward me over the last two months had gone far beyond duty.
He had wanted me. My body. Every last inch. Despite the dangers my skin presented to him, he had pushed the limits of his control on more than one occasion, almost giving in to his bloodlust and, well, lust in general.
My face immediately heated as I recalled our time together at the cabin. I had never felt so utterly consumed, so perfectly connected to someone than in those handful of hours with him. And yet . . .
I hadn’t been the only Syphon in his life.
And yet . . .
He was a liar. A killer. A murderer of my kind.
And yet . . .
I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Couldn’t stop worrying that he was dead. There had been so much blood. On his back, on my hands. Who knew how many silver bullets had buried themselves deep into his flesh. And when I’d fallen on top of him, knocked unconscious, I couldn’t tell if his heart was still beating.
As panic threatened to constrict my throat once again, I began to pace my small prison, staring sightlessly at the bright reinforced walls.
I should hate him. I should want to rip out his heart with my bare hands before he could do the same to me. Why hadn’t he? Why hunt me for years on end only to seduce me? Even his brothers, in the very short time I’d known them, seemed baffled by his behavior toward me.
Fates, I needed to stop thinking about him already. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. The worry and questions were eating me alive.
I dug my fingers into my thick chestnut hair, wincing when they got stuck. I hadn’t brushed it, let alone showered, since arriving here. The curtained-off showerhead in the room’s corner taunted me, but I refused to strip naked. Who knew how many hidden cameras were trained on me this very moment.
Instead of dwelling on Lochlan’s behavior or current predicament, I should be planning a way to escape this place. But there were no windows, nothing to even hint at where I was. Through a slot in the room’s only door, I’d received three meals so far. But the only person I’d seen was my aunt.
Had she finally rid herself of me then, like I always thought she would? I couldn’t really blame her, not after what had happened on our front lawn the other day. If our house hadn’t been warded against vampires, Lochlan’s brothers probably would have gone after her too.
Then again, she wasn’t exactly helpless. When had she learned how to shoot a crossbow? An unexpected pang of sadness pierced my chest. Fates, I didn’t know her at all. The woman who’d raised me was a complete stranger. What did that say about me? That I was naive and clueless, completely inept at getting to know someone in the ways that truly mattered?
I stumbled to a halt in the room’s center as an awful thought swirled in my gut.
What if I was the reason for my lack of close connections? Not the constant moving and nomadic lifestyle, but me and me alone. What if I wasn’t capable of understanding people on a deeper level?
What if . . .
Something was wrong with me?
And that was why Aunt Tess, my caretaker for all these years, had knocked me out, kidnapped me, and locked me in a room. She had given up on me . . .
Because I was defective.
Just like my powers.
Numbly, I shuffled backward and sank onto my bed. When I had grabbed Everett’s wrist, nothing had happened. Not even the tiniest bit of red had flared up where our skin touched.
So . . . who was I?
Was I even a Syphon?
So distracted by my self doubt, I wasn’t prepared when the door unlocked and swung open.
I sat up straight, but didn’t jump up and bolt for freedom like I’d imagined myself doing dozens of times. Not when my visitor had a big black bird perched on her shoulder. Was it fake? A throaty caw from the thing startled me, confirming that it was very much real. Uncomfortable under its beady-eyed stare, I swung my attention to the woman instead.
She looked to be in her mid forties, tall and striking. Her porcelain skin was paler than my aunt’s, her pixie-cut hair even paler. Fashionable gold half-rim glasses adorned her thin elegant nose, and a sharp black pantsuit hugged her lithe frame.
A bout of self-consciousness assailed me when I realized how drab I looked in comparison, with my baggie white shirt and gray pants.
Before I could decide what to do next, she said, “Hello, Kenna,” in a slightly European-accented voice I vaguely recognized. She must be the woman who’d spoken to my aunt when I’d first woken up here. “I’m Headmistress Mayweather, or Clarice, if you like. I’m assuming you have questions as to why you’re here.”
Duh, I wanted to snap but didn’t. Instead, I blurted, “Where’s my aunt
?”
“She had business to attend to. You’re in my care now.” Ouch. Hearing the truth stung more than I thought it would. When I wordlessly pursed my lips, her expression softened. “I understand your resentment, Kenna.”
Yeah, right. Have you ever been dumped at a creepy facility by your caretaker before?
“Tess only wants what’s best for you, as do I. She thought telling you the truth about who you are would put you in even more danger, but I know that doesn’t make this any easier. If you let me, I’d like to educate you on your ancestral history. This is a school for supernaturals, after all, where you can learn about and master your natural-born abilities.”
Wait, this wasn’t a mental institution? I was at a school for supernaturals?
Curiosity reared its head, which I quickly shoved back down. I was still a prisoner here. Prisoner. When both the woman and crow stared at me expectantly, I grasped the bracelet on my left wrist, habitually twisting the key-shaped silver charm round and round. Her gaze fixed on the nervous habit and I immediately dropped it.
“Do you know what that is?” she said, shifting her keen brown eyes to mine.
“Um, a bracelet that can protect you against vampire thrall?” I assumed she must know about vampires or this was going to be an awkward conversation.
“Correct, but it’s so much more than that. A powerful Cosmic witch infused the silver charm with a spell created just for you. It prohibits you from stealing the essence and magic of other supernaturals through physical touch. It also prevents supernaturals from using their abilities on you.”
Oh. Oh. That would explain why my touch hadn’t affected Everett. Maybe I wasn’t completely defective after all.
But wait a freaking second. A witch spelled this bracelet? Just for me? Did that mean this bracelet and the broken one before it hadn’t belonged to my mother?
A fresh wave of hurt and resentment toward my aunt welled up, nearly choking me. Was everything she ever told me a lie?
“My aunt,” I gritted out through clenched teeth. “Is she a witch?”
Curse Touched: A Paranormal Vampire Romance (A Touch of Vampire Book 2) Page 1